Outraged Richmond, Virginia, resident Dana Bagby said she doesn't understand how she could possibly owe the city more than $15,000 in unpaid utility bills, but according to the Department of Public Utilities, that's what she owes, and that's how much she'll have to pay.

According to WTVR, an error on the city's part meant Bagby was never notified that the city was charging her for payments she said she paid, and they say they never received.

Department of Public Utilities spokeswoman Angela Fountain said "this fell through the cracks. It certainly did."

Bagby is vowing to fight the monster bill, and told WTVR, "Somebody needs to do something. Somebody needs to help me."

I worked in a call center for a utility a while back, and "I never got any accounts from you, why is my bill so high??" was pretty much the standard line that every customer would use when they were late paying or got a big bill. Seriously, I heard it ALL the time. And they always wanted the company (Telecom NZ) to credit the amount off. Often, people just try getting irate and blustering down the line, hoping to get some poor phone monkey to cave in and credit them, and would often ring back again and again trying new operators (as a team leader on the weekend, the calls would often come back to my team, so I would hear the same story many times, sometimes they try changing little details.

I'm not saying that this is the case for the woman in the story - obviously I don't know all the details - but my initial instinct is to be pretty dubious. I mean it must have been months and months, and if she WAS paying, surely she was paying some amount from an account or something? And surely (if her story is correct) the account would have a larger and larger amount owing each time? Or was she just randomly paying some amount each month and hoping for the best? People have to take SOME responsibility for their own affairs...